From white to green: Snow cover loss and increased vegetation productivity in the European Alps.

Mountains are hotspots of biodiversity and ecosystem services, but they are warming about twice as fast as the global average. Climate change may reduce alpine snow cover and increase vegetation productivity, as in the Arctic. Here, we demonstrate that 77% of the European Alps above the tree line experienced greening (productivity gain) and <1% browning (productivity loss) over the past four decades.

Generalizing soil properties in geographic space: Approaches used and ways forward.

Soil is one of the most complex systems on Earth, functioning at the interface between the lithosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere and generating a multitude of functions. Moreover, soil constitutes the belowground environment from which plants capture water and nutrients. Despite their great importance, soil properties are often not sufficiently considered in other disciplines, especially in spatial studies of plant distributions.